The future of mobile communication lies in no single radio technology. At the moment, a typical low-end mobile station carries GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) based 2G (2nd Generation) radio and possibly its derivatives, such as EDGE (enhanced data rates for GSM evolution) and GPRS (general packet radio service). Mid-priced mobiles have WCDMA (wide-band code-division multiple access) based 3G (3rd Generation) radio that have very different characteristics from the mobile point of view when compared to GSM in terms of technology, bit rates, power consumption, etc., even if in the network side the backbone is said to be similar. A plurality of other radio technologies, such as 3.5G, 3.9G (or LTE (Long Term Evolution)), 4G are being introduced to the mobiles, and apart from the cellular radios, some mobile stations are already provided with WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) and Bluetooth.
Using a mobile station will be very different from the user's perspective when multiple radios are available. Till now, when one starts for example a browser, one has to pre-configure or manually choose the connection that is the radio interface to be used by the browser. This is not acceptable from the user's point of view when plenty of radios are available. That is, a user may not be an expert on different radios, and configuring all of them is a difficult task. Some radios may be under the control of an operator and the operator might want to configure such connections. Furthermore, even if the user might be able to select and configure the radio connection he or she chose, the chosen radio may not be the optimum one not even by the user's standards. Different radios have different characteristics, and even if, for example, cost is probably quite straight forward for the user to make the decision with, measures like power consumption exist that are impossible for user the to optimize.
Thus a need exists to improve mechanisms in selecting a radio interface in a mobile station.